Written by Shon Barrier, Vice President of Research & Development
If your privacy team is like most hospitals, managing influxes of privacy tasks, as a result of new privacy concerns can be difficult. While the answer of bringing in 3rd party help might seem expensive or difficult to manage, in reality, supplementing your privacy team as needed by using Patient Privacy Managed Services can help your healthcare organizations quickly scale up to accommodate new requests and scale down when resources are no longer needed.
Let’s look at 5 situations when you might want consider augmenting your staff with managed services:
1) Proactive Security
With the increase in PHI breaches over the past two years, healthcare organizations are focusing on becoming more proactive with their efforts. The problem is with the increased amount of data generated by hospitals, privacy and IT teams have little time to do more than react to the growing number of investigations, so the proactive plan is difficult to implement.
If the above scenario sounds like your organization, managed services can be brought in to extend your team with qualified privacy analysts to handle time consuming activities such as monitoring and reporting, allowing internal teams to focus on the new higher-level priorities.
2) Business Continuity
When we hear “business continuity” in healthcare, most of the time we think about IT infrastructure and not employees. The truth is, when any employee leaves, existing teams must share the burden until a new resource arrives which can potentially lead to oversights and mistakes. What’s more, it can often take weeks to hire a replacement, and even longer until they are fully trained.
If there are periods of time when a privacy team experiences turnover, calling upon patient privacy managed services allows organizations to immediately fill employment gaps with ready-to-go experts when you need them, and discontinue those services when your team is trained and back up to full speed.
3) Audit Readiness
Even fully staffed privacy teams are not immune to challenges. An unexpected OCR audit adds an immense amount of stress to even the most efficient teams. Whether it’s handing off the OCR audit workload to a trusted provider or covering the day-to-day so there’s no lapse in monitoring, you can simplify your OCR audit process without having to worry about staffing or resource issues.
4) Cost Effectiveness
One of the reasons healthcare organizations use managed services is simply because of the cost, despite the misconception that it’s “expensive” to bring in a 3rd party. More often than not, managed services offers scalability and flexibility in a way that is not plausible for in-house teams, or at least, not cost-effectively. Managed services also help your finance team forecast operational costs with a predictable monthly spend.
5) A Less Stressed Privacy Team
Privacy teams inundated with an increasingly amount of data carries a hidden cost in the form potential burnout. While workloads may spike on some occasions, sustained heavy workloads may lead to high turnover as employees depart for less stressful opportunities.
Reducing stress and creating opportunities for more strategic work through managed services not only benefits your organization with a more innovative patient privacy strategy, but cost savings in the form of improved employee engagement and retention.
We’re Here to Help
Obtaining privacy resources isn’t as challenging as you might think. iatricSystems’ Patient Privacy Managed Services can act as an extension of your patient privacy team to free up resources and increase team efficiency. For more information about managed services please contact info@iatric.com
